A single mountain towering to a sharp peak is the setting for this minecraft survival map. You spawn in a small boat just off the shore of the mountainous island with no supplies save a single tree and the bones of your less fortunate crewmen, which will certainly come in handy as fertilizer on your upcoming adventure.

But you are not alone on the high seas, there are several other ships. Not ships that will offer any hope of rescue however, these are the legendary monster ridden ships of yore. Each ship contains a different hoard of blood thirsty monsters who must be slain if you wish to capture their supplies.

Though this is a simple map at heart, it has all the ingredients of a fun survival experience, challenging terrain, limited resources, the impending doom of outside threats and of course, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are also additional challenges, like building cactus farms and going fishing and all that sort of thing.

Oh, and there’s more than one surprise waiting in this map, so don’t be too quick to judge a book by its cover. It may appear to be simple, but your expectations could very well be subverted in this cone of rock and dirt which turns out to have, without being too spoilerish about it – Tardis like qualities. You have been warned.

Nuked is a narrative survival map, meaning that the first map you download is but chapter one in a series of daring escapes. In this first installment you wake up in quite a neat little bunker in the middle of a small and barren archipelogo of sand and smoothstone islands. The rest of the world has been nuked and instead of just staying on your island, where the radiation has apparently not reached, you’ve decided to get to the End and kill a dragon, because you seek danger like a lemming seeks cliffs.

Before you start thinking this is going to be easy, you should be warned that all the ores in this map have been hand placed, which means striking it rich is a matter of persistence and eating a lot of dry bread. And perhaps a little melon if you can get a patch up and running. They should really just call this Vegan Survival Island.

My only complaint is that you spawn in a bunker, which means shelter, which means you could ‘technically’ win this map just by staring at a wall. You wouldn’t have completed the challenges of course, but challenges are for people who like artificial constructs.

Platforms is a minecraft survival map with a simple premise. Everything floats. Everything floats up here. It floats in square platforms which require supreme navigation skills in the form of single lane bridge building.

The problem with this map is the fact that every single platform is but a single brick thick, which means you’re knocking 90% of them into the void when you break them, which is a little tedious. A lot tedious. There has to be a better way to do this.

For best effect, think of this map as a sort of ‘build your own survival map’ challenge. All the materials you need are scattered about the platforms, all you have to do is collect them and then recombine them into something a little larger, a little more like home.

Are there challenges? Of course there are, mostly map specific challenges too, which I like. None of these senseless minecraft survival map challenges where nothing means anything. These are challenges that all relate to the fact that you’re madly leaping from platform to platform acting on behalf of the forces of gravity.

It’s a long way down when you spawn in the void of the sky, Skyring is a Skyblock inspired map with several differences that make it quite an entertaining minecraft survival challenge. One spawns at the very top of the concentric sky rings, with one block of water which serves as a four pronged elevator through the various biomes available on the skyring ,a bed and trees growing up from below on four sides.

Each ring of the skyring map represents a mini version of a biome. There is a desert ring, a jungle ring, a forest ring, a snow ring, you get the general idea. There is even a farm ring, where the very small space has been engineered to hold an ark number of important animals.

One must be careful when taking advantage of the apparent convenience that is the water elevator, for drowning is the least of your worries. Once you sink too far, a cold death in the void is the only hope for you.

In addition to the rings, there is a dungeon type structure known only as ‘Nether Tower’ floating off the coast, as it were, of the Skyring. This provides a strong survival goal, a reason for navigating all those rings. But be sure not to approach the Nether Tower before you have crafted yourself sufficient protections – for the mobs that lurk in that fire proof structure will singe you to an inch of your digital life.

Saw is a minecraft map based on the Saw movies. there aren’t a whole lot of minecraft maps that impart what I would call a deep sense of psychological tension, perhaps even terror, but this is one of them. From portal skipping trips through time and space to strange rooms where the lights flicker on and off at unsettlingly random intervals, Saw is a minecraft survival adventure map that will not only test your minecraft skills to their very limits, but scare the heck out of you along the way.

This map is not content with tormenting you by inflicting suffering on you alone, at various stages your actions will bode ill for innocents around you. Jigsaw has little mercy for anyone, least of all you, Steve.

Most minecraft maps can be overcome by quick thinking, quick acting and a decent working knowledge of the sprint button, but this Saw minecraft map often puts you in apparently impossible situations, which quickly turn out to be actual impossible situations. Luck and the ability to restart the map from scratch are the only things that will save you. Seriously, if you die, don’t even bother respawning, just delete and re-extract the map. Keep the .zip file around, you’re going to need it.